You will (as sometimes people say)

laugh; you will (as clairvoyants

say) roar with laughter, gentlemen—

but, word of honor, I have a crony, who

would be thrilled to shake hands

with the head of a state or of any other enterprise.

Since when, I wonder,

in the pit of the stomach

we’ve begun to experience a tender

bubbling, when looking through an opera glass

at the burly one, bristly haired, in the grand box? Since when the concept

of authority has been equated

with the seminal notion of patria?

All sorts of Romans and butchers;

Charles the Handsome and Charles the Hideous;

utterly rotten princelings; fat-breasted

German ladies; and various

cannibals, loverboys, lumbermen, Johns, Lewises, Lenins,

emitting stool grunts of strain and release, propping elbows on knees,

sat on their massive old thrones.

The historian dies of sheer boredom:

On the heels of Mamay comes another Mamay.

Does our plight really force us to do what did bureaucratic Cathay

that with heaps of superfluous centuries augmented her limited history

(which, however, hardly became either better or merrier)?

Per contra, the coachmen of empires look good

when performing their duties: swiftly

toward them flies the blue of the sky;

their flame-colored sleeves clap in the wind;

the foreign observer looks on and sees

in front bulging eyes of great beauty

and behind a beautiful blend

of divan cushion and monstrous pumpkin.

But the decorated big fellow or else the trench-coated wolf in his army cap with a German steep peak, hoarse-voiced, his face all distorted, speaking from an immobile convertible,

or, again, a banquet

with Caucasian wine.

No, thank you.

If my late namesake,

who used to write verse, in rank

and in file, at the very dawn

of the Soviet Small-Bourgeois order, had lived till its noon

he would be now finding taut rhymes

such as “praline” or “air chill,”

and others of the same kind.